Meeting Life's curveballs
& finding who you are in the process!
Using this time of crisis to deepen your connection to your Self.
What happened??!!
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The crisis may be a health diagnosis, adultery, watching someone we cherish disintegrate, death of a loved one, or our livelihood ending. Whatever it is, likely it was unexpected, or, at the very least, had more impact than you expected.
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These moments can arrive as a shock, or a dawning realisation that it has been this way for a long time, but been unwilling to look at it. Either way, the wake-up call has trumpeted, and here we are, unable to pretend otherwise.
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This crisis is multi-dimentional, in that we can meet it in a number of ways.​
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Let's explore these paths, and given where you're at, reflect on how you want to meet this time in your life.​

Reality & Resilience
# The path of Reality & Resilience
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Resilience has a cycle of disturbance (that's that WTF moment), adaptation (building resilience) and responsibility (owning what's yours, taking responsibility moving forward, and creating something positive from this place).
Sometimes we can choose to step up and meet the challenge in front of us with courage and resilience. We want to see our Self grow through this troubling time, with a knowing that we CAN DO whatever is needed to get through to the other side.
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​​An apt adage for this path is What doesn't break us, makes us stronger.
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In times like these, you may wish to explore your inner and inter-connected resilience, to lay it all the on the table and see what is required of you to 'see this through'.
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What qualities are your strength at this time? And what needs further cultivation?
This moment has a fierce honesty to it, the reality check of what we have been unwilling to look at. The signals were there, and now, here we are, being told to pay attention and attend to this part of our life.
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Meeting life as it presents itself, with utter honesty, is the hallmark of resilience.
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We may think it's about knuckling through, but that only strengthens our old patterns of behaviour. Can we turn towards our experience as it is?
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This is the cultivation of fortitude and commitment in the areas of mindfulness, positive relationships, self-care, self-awareness and a sense of purpose and meaning. ​​​​​
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Our Hakomi sessions can explore and cultivate these qualities in your life, enabling you to meet what life delivers.

Catastrophe & Courage
​​​​​# The path of Catastrophe & Courage
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Sometimes our crisis takes us further out than we have capacity to hold. It feels disastrous! What has landed at our feet is a God-has-forsaken-me moment, like a betrayal of trust penetrating so deep that there's no going on as we once did. Our tried-and-true has broken away and this moment is asking something very different from us.
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Can we allow ourselves to be completely broken open? To be in the ashes of what was. Truly, it takes courage to be here! ​
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Vera De Chalambert - a scholar and devotee of Kali, the Dark Mother Goddess, says; Kali will see to it that we are broken. Or to put it another way, the intelligence of Life will give us whatever it is that is specifically ghastly to us in order to bring us to our knees. This is our personally curated and bespoke catastrophe that waited for this moment, orchestrated in the stars, and constellated into our family, loved ones, or workplace. Vera offers this...
"Nothing can save us from disappointment, despair, depression, disease. There is no hope for us. But that is not a hopeless condition."
This is not a hopeless condition, yet it may feel so. We live within a great paradox and begs for not only our audience, but our participation and direction as well. Even when we're cut through and not wanting a peak of anything more.
Even then, are we willing to lay our stomach on the earth in full prostration to the hopelessness of our situation?​​
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There is a sense of enormity being in such close proximity to this moment, and maybe, just maybe, with the cultivation of curiosity, there is the possibility to turn towards the feelings evoked and the dearth that has been unearthed as a result.​
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Our Hakomi sessions will gently hold this darkness, allowing the polishing to happen in its own time. We will walk together towards that which feels wholesome and welcoming while honouring the ashes and all that has been.

Empathy & Enquiry
​# The path of Empathy & Enquiry
When life is feeling more difficult, more complicated, more over-whelming, it's a signal to change something. But what?
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With everything shifting and potentially everything up for negotiation, what might be most essential at this time is the space to be able to tune in to your needs and navigate decisions with clarity of heart and mind.
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Do we have that clarity? Do we have the means to discover what's being asked of us?
This is the work. We need to find a way to slow everything down, tune into the subtle, and, with empathy, listen to what needs to happen, to let the intelligence of our body inform us.​​​
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At this time in our life, there is the opportunity to make this our most primary preoccupation; what is being asked of me? What must I become in order to endure / grow / shift to whatever degree is needed? How do I reclaim what I know to be true but I don't always know how to live it?
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Our Hakomi sessions will cultivate empathy and self contemplation, allowing this crisis to be the catalyst for you to discover who you are, what your values are, how you want to live these values, and what your unique gift is in the world.

Soul & Hero
​​​​# The path of Soul & the Hero/ine​​
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Suddenly there's no tricks left, there's no avenues to make it all better. It's easy to keep shuffling our circumstances rather than confront what's here in front of us, but now, finally, the only way left is to raise our level of consciousness, to shift awareness, hear the teachings, and turn inwards.
Let's pan out for a moment and take in a wider landscape, that encompasses our soul journey. What lessons are we here to learn, and in time, guide or teach for others? What is shaping us uniquely in order to steer us in a direction that aligns with our soul contract?
In a secular society, this aspect of healing is largely felt as a deficit as we have lost the language to give us a greater frame of reference for our soul's experience. But this language still exists, written into myths and the pantheon stories from the ancient traditions.
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From the belief, knowing or faith that there is a governing force, called God, or Life, or Great Spirit, that is present and of a higher intelligence than our own small fractal of experience, we can meet life's obstacles and challenges in a very different way.
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The invitation is to consider, as many great sages have invited us to, that this Earth is a school, a class room designed to allow us to dance in the gamut of free choice towards a greater destiny. Timeline unknown. That's up to us, and perhaps, as the sages also suggest, this can take many life times.
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So what is this life time refining in you? It may or may not be a grand sense of purpose and meaning that we uncover, it could equally be a set of qualities that feel wholesome to live by, and the task is to live those qualities. To be, rather than to do.
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How does this sit with you?
Is life doing this to you or is life happening for you?
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In the former, we, quite sensibly, collapse under the enormity of that wave, washed around by circumstances. In the latter we find our selves, humbly, and perhaps tentatively acknowledging that the journey is to surrender into the grace of that higher intelligence and to meet our self with less obstructions and conditions.
This doesn't mean we sit securely in one camp or other, we oscillate between these two poles, finding where we victim ourselves to the circumstances, and where we can stand with radical self-responsibility as the co-creator of our life.
All the while wondering; is this moment of crisis a bump in the road, a wobble in our commitment, a self-saboteur in operation, or is it a course-correct onto a new path?
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That is the work, and it requires faith to see through the wider arch of our story and to see what we are bringing to the table that is obstructing the free flow of Life.
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Here we enter the story of the mythic hero/ine and her journey back home (home being nothing less than her return to Self, as a courageous and humbled player in her own story of self discovery).
Veiled in this, and into every mythic story, is the separation from the tribe, exiled, followed by an ordeal, and then the home-coming. It's programmed into our human experience for growth and re-connection back to Self.
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It is the soul's story.
Dr. Martin Shaw, acclaimed teacher of myth, guide and story-teller, is passionate about bringing the old stories back into our collective consciousness for this very reason. Rites of passage and story telling go hand-in-hand says Shaw, and it is the mythic story that holds our hands as we cross over the threshold of what was, to what is. We need the epic story to reference off, to know that we are not going this alone, and in fact, are stepping more fully into the author-ship of our life.​
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Our Hakomi sessions are shamanic in nature. We meet the Hero, the Victim, the Saboteur, the Wise Witch, the Giants and whatever else is playing its part in our psyche. We let the story unfold, witnessing, observant of what turns we need to take, what paths need to be explored, what dragon needs to be slayed or befriended. The story is waiting to be written as consciously as we are able.
